Not entirely. The I Corner Him and Stab Him in the Face! rules are (also) there for fights that don’t make sense as a full Firefight. If a PC FoN storms out the back exit of the opera theatre into the alleyway behind it, and the GM’s thugs are waiting there, that shouldn’t be a full Firefight no matter how the PC feels about it - even if what’s at stake is getting captured or killed.
Aside from that, would the target of the observe/close combat/surgery still have the option to “cut and run” before the close combat roll even though it isn’t a conflict?
Of course: Inconspicuous or Infiltration versus Observation, or whatever versus Security. If the PC FoN wins the versus test, the GM’s characters can’t find them. If you can’t find them, you can’t Close Combat to capture them, so you can’t hull them (yet)! And even if the GM’s characters smoke the PC FoN in the Security/Observation, there’s that Close Combat (or Power, if you’re using the Overbear action from the Close Combat rules) test to give the PC FoN a chance to cut and run. If that’s blown, though, I don’t realistically see how the PC gets to oppose the Surgery test.
I had a one-roll ICHASHITF - not even a mini-Firefight - with my intent as “Kill your PC!” and I still couldn’t kill the bugger.
Oh, and I always see one thing overlooked when people talk about the one-two-three hulling combo: the test to patch up the wound from the hull! This came back to bite me in the ass majorly in our BE game - my newly hulled GM FoN nearly died from a successful field hulling! I prefer to capture a FoN ahead of time, then hull them and patch up the wound in the same builder.
Well first killing someone can never be the stakes of a firefight. The sscenario you described should still be a full conflict and not a one roll resolution. Now, it would be a minifirefight, but still a conflict.
Of course: Inconspicuous or Infiltration versus Observation, or whatever versus Security. If the PC FoN wins the versus test, the GM’s characters can’t find them. If you can’t find them, you can’t Close Combat to capture them, so you can’t hull them (yet)! And even if the GM’s characters smoke the PC FoN in the Security/Observation, there’s that Close Combat (or Power, if you’re using the Overbear action from the Close Combat rules) test to give the PC FoN a chance to cut and run. If that’s blown, though, I don’t realistically see how the PC gets to oppose the Surgery test.
I put “cut and run” in quotes because I was refering to a specific rules option in firefight on page 506.
I disagree, depending of course on the context of the game. (I know, I know, my bad for using a hypothetical.) I assume 1 PC versus a couple (or even a few) thugs, all of whom may or may not be packing small arms. Why would we want to bother with disposition? How do Advance and Withdraw fit in the context of an alleyway beatdown? Mini-Firefights are for extended close combats and the like; this seems like it’s going to be a short, brutal and possibly bloody affair.
The reason you can’t have “I kill him” as your intent in BE is because weapons are unreliable, not because you never want to turn a motherfucker to a pile of ash.
You can’t simply point and shoot anything – a nuke, a fusor, a pistol – and know with absolute certainty that it’ll get the job done. You have to roll up your sleeves and dig in, make triple sure – find the body, put two in the temple and cut off the head and burn it.
Yeah, that’s basically what I’m getting at. I guess I’d be careful to point out that that doesn’t ALWAYS come up and my intent is never to dick with the scene timing such that the other side doesn’t have any resources available to it. An example from a recent game:
Vishnu, Liberator of 10,000 Worlds, Font of Enlightment and Vaylen scumbag is ready to take the fight to the surface of his next world. His ships are more-or-less evenly matched in space, and we’ve established that the human side has forces in orbit. So I begin coloring a scene: Vishnu and his 2iC hop into his shuttle and head to the planet’s surface to coordinate with their ground forces, which we colored had already landed in a previous maneuver.
Commander Harkin’s player is all “oh no you di’n’t!” when he figures out what my scene is “about.” He doesn’t want my dude on the ground – really he wants to be able to assault my (color only) ground forces with his own color later – color trumps color, right? So the player basically Says Yes to boarding the shuttle, Says Yes to my approach to the planet, and then asks me to Roll the Dice when it’s time to break the blockade. That’s on me to spend a Builder to make happen. Or, if I’d rather set up a fancier stake (!) and/or hit a nice compromise, I can put in all my chips and opt for a full scripted Conflict.
In that particular game, we made it a roll-off … Piloting vs. Sensors I think. If the GM wins, Vishnu slips past the blockade and joins his army. If the player wins, Vishnu is stopped in space. In either case, the fiction is updated and we all have to play to that now.
Turned out that Vishnu got spotted. Harkins’ player then opted to use HIS Conflict to start a firefight: a bunch of cruisers vs. Vishnu’s shuttle + escort (with me furiously Circling up good pilots, or at least better than his Hammer Lord gave him…)
I think it’s the same, yeah. I also think, looking back lo those many years ago (2?) that there’s some…looseness around who provokes what and when, and how all that connects to the scene economy. Like I know the Say Yes… rule in BE is kind of hinky compared to BW/MG because it’s not cool for the GM to just Say Yes to any old thing (like hulling NPCs, even though there are no PCs involved in the scene).
Hans asked for an example of what it’s like for the players to Say Yes to the GM. This is the just the example that came to mind.
so in your example, Paul, the players didn’t stop the GM and make a building scene to oppose her, they said, “no, if you want that shit you’ll have to roll for it,” and made the GM take a Building scene? That makes a lot of sense, but from reading the book I didn’t understand that this is how play is supposed to flow. May be my fault for not reading closely.
Yup, that’s the ticket and something I wanted to clarify. I don’t think the players have the outright authority to require the GM roll, but that’s how we do it here.
Maybe a good way to describe it is that everyone has to work together to identify the core conflict(s)** of the scene. That’s where the dice go. Keeping in mind that where you require rolls inherently defines how far the action/narrative can progress in this scene/maneuver. Therefore Rule 0 has to come into play, least you cockblock someone from attempting reasonable progress towards their character’s goals.
EDIT: ** To be clear that is small ‘c’ conflict, not necessarily big ‘C’ Conflict Scene.
To my mind, the principle is very simple, regardlessof whether you’re a GM or a player. Are you achieving a mechanical advantage with your scene or bypassing a mechanical advantage established by someone else? Then roll. Otherwise, color/Say Yes is sufficient.
For instance, if a player has taken the time to establish a security system at his warehouse and used a building scene to create the technology, the GM can’t blow right past it. He needs to roll to bypass security.
If the player only used a color scene to establish the security, the GM only needs to use a color scene to bypass it. And if the player hasn’t established anything at all, then the GM can just Say Yes to breaking into the warehouse.
